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Comment by gonational | Hacker News Reader

The United States CDC literally changed the definition of "vaccine" this year, so that these products could still be identified as vaccines. You're going to tell me that it's "science illiterate" to consider mRNA therapy as gene therapy, because the genes are not actually changed, but instead only expressed to create the therapeutic effect. But it is "scientifically literate" to call such a therapy a "vaccine"?

I hope more common sense literate proponents of science can appreciate how much it harms their case for a vast majority of science advocates to be loud and wrong.

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> The United States CDC literally changed the definition of "vaccine" this year, so that these products could still be identified as vaccines.

For anyone else curious:

Before the change, the definition for “vaccination” read, “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.” Now, the word “immunity” has been switched to “protection.” [1]

It seems obvious to me that this was changed because the layperson’s interpretation of the old wording would make it seem like 100% immunity was the result of vaccination. That’s never been the case. The new wording is just clearer in regular English.

> You're going to tell me that it's "science illiterate" to consider mRNA therapy as gene therapy, because the genes are not actually changed, but instead only expressed to create the therapeutic effect.

It’s not only science illiterate, it’s misleading to a layperson too. It sounds as if it’s changing the patient’s DNA.

> I hope more common sense literate proponents of science can appreciate how much it harms their case for a vast majority of science advocates to be loud and wrong

I do t understand how you think your interpretations lie closer to “common sense”. They seem to me to be more like;y to mislead.

[1]https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25411126...

For anybody else who stumbles across the above uninformed comment, here is some information for context (wrt "gene therapy", etc.):

https://www.nature.com/gt/journal-information

https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/gene-based-therape...

A certain degree of ignorance can be forgiven in this day and age, because everything is being constantly re-defined by the television, and most folks get their information from the television.

So don't attack people for not knowing things, but just be aware how many low information people are unintentionally misleading others. You can even see in the parent comment, the primary source of information for most of these people is some form of media company (Miami Herald, in this case). This is, unfortunately, the new normal.

Logging in with different accounts and downvoting this won't change the facts.

I was prepared to believe I was wrong about the technical definition of ‘gene therapy’, but your links are to a description of the journal called “Gene Therapy”, and an article about “Gene-Based Therapeutic Approaches” that mentions the term once.

A google search for “gene therapy” brings up many links to respectable organizations and publications, most of which state that ‘gene therapy’ involves altering the patient’s DNA. No vaccines do this. To call them ‘gene therapy’ to the public (or to ‘low information people’, if you insist) is misleading at best and scaremongering at worst.

As for the link to a Miami Herald article about the CDC’s wording change, how do you suggest I search for the likely source of the parent comment’s information?

It said (with no sourcing) “The United States CDC literally changed the definition of "vaccine" this year, so that these products could still be identified as vaccines” and I wanted to get a sense for the truth of that - and if true, if the legitimacy of the change. What I found did not concern me.

…and thinking about this a bit more, it seems unlikely to me that any sort of approval for medication that makes it less likely that a person would become infected with Covid (colloquially, a ‘vaccine’) would rely on the definition of the word “vaccine” on an informational CDC web site - which seems to be what you’re (perhaps unintentionally) _implying_ with your comments.

If this is what you believe, do you have a source for this?

> You're going to tell me that it's "science illiterate" to consider mRNA therapy as gene therapy, because the genes are not actually changed ..

Yes. That's exactly what I'm saying. Read your sentence back to yourself.

> But it is "scientifically literate" to call such a therapy a "vaccine"?

Yes. Of course it is. Regardless of what the copy on some obscure CDC website says, mRNA vaccines have been in development for decades.

> Regardless of what the copy on some obscure CDC website says

Read that, out loud...

All you need to do is set your search parameters to filter out items from the past 24 months.

https://www.nature.com/gt/journal-information

https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/gene-based-therape...

There are thousands more.

SMH... short memory span is the worst part of the human condition.

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